Sunday, December 27, 2009

Feeling pretty

I went to a makeup store last week. I had never been to one before. It was full of little and big bottles, powders, lipsticks, eyeshadows of a thousand different colors. Use this to lenghten your eyelashes. This foundation will even your skin tone and will get rid of blotches. I did not know I had blotches. This will thicken your eyelashes. Thicken but not lenghten. This will conceal any dark spots under the eyes and this, when applied properly, will make your nose look thiner and probably more distinguished. Pictures of women that look nothing like me were hanging on the walls. Maybe there was a latina that looked like the women on soap operas with curves in all the right places and long hair that falls in waves down their backs. I started feeling small, very small and pudgy and blotchy and inadequate. All the makeup in the store wouldn´t have been enough for me to feel beautiful. I wonder if that is the whole point, to make women feel that there is always something that we need to mask, to makeup, to cover. I was very close to buy a "little something" but it was hard to decide which part of my face needed the most help. I only allowed myself to try the most expensive mascara in the store, $35 dollars for a chanel mascara that promised to thicken my eyelashes and wow the world. I was rather disappointed. The woman looking back at me on the mirror was the same as before. I wish i could say that I left the store with some revelation about my inner beauty, my outer beauty or the perpetuation of female stereotypes. I left feeling sad.The next morning I woke up, washed my face and told myself "good morning Edith, this is your imperfectly beautiful face and body, you better deal with it". Maybe next year I will learn to love myself a little more and to embrace the eyelashes that God gave me at birth.

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The Talmud reads, "Never pray in a room without windows." Never pray without the world in mind, in other words. The purpose of the spiritual life is not to save us from reality. It is to enable us to go on co-creating it.
- Joan Chittister